Re: [NTLK] OT Kilometers

From: Johannes Wolf (mp2100_at_mail-gw.estec.esa.int)
Date: Mon May 03 2004 - 06:25:35 PDT


Chris,

just my two cents to put things into the right light:

beeing an engineer, I cannot agree at all to your statement.

As soon as it comes to physical units that can be expressed using basic
units like
meters, grams, liters, you are simply lost if you stick to the outdated but
traditional imperial units.
And to make it crystal clear: the demand for unified metric units comes
clearly from scientists and engineers who need to work with them for their
daily tasks, because using SI units makes life much easier. The SI (Systeme
International d'Unites) is existing since 1954 and now it is really time to
get rid of the antiquated imperial units.

And please do not mix up technical + scientific issues with politics and
history.

You may be right, that nowadays in the computer age it does not matter which
units you use, but
1) real life proofs the contrary (remember the famous lost NASA mission) and
2) I am totally against that new generation of engineers who are not able
anymore to be critical with respect to computer generated (measurement or
simulation) results (they believe totally blind in the computer generated
data) and who are not able to perform a simple check by hand with
estimations.

Johannes Wolf

> -----Original Message-----
> From: newtontalk-bounce_at_newtontalk.net
> [mailto:newtontalk-bounce_at_newtontalk.net]On Behalf Of Chris Edwards
> Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 11:12 AM
> To: newtontalk_at_newtontalk.net
> Subject: Re: [NTLK] OT Kilometers

> We still use real miles over here, and it is the EEC that persicuited
> real feet and pounds, with computers the units involved do not matter,
> imperial is a tradition and I am pleased the USA have the balls to
> stand up against the politically correct gestapo (now I have mentioned
> Hitled is it the end of the thread, at least I vaguely mentioned
> computers( I think the newt is one!)
> Chris Edwards

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